Lincoln Lesson Idea: Journaling the Address

Level
- Middle School - High School

Subjects - Social Studies, History, Government

Objectives:Students will interpret the Gettysburg Address and explicate the language.

Activity: Share the TeachersFirst resource The Gettysburg Address with your students. Share the document on an interactive whiteboard or projector. Have students take turns reading each section aloud to the class. After reading the entire document, have students write a journal entry with their questions and ideas about what it means. The language is quite compact, so they are certain to have misunderstandings about it.

Tips: On your whiteboard, have students highlight and annotate parts of the text to make sense of them. With most groups, it is best to ask for the personal interpretations after the whole class explication. Differentiate by allowing some students to work on this independently without the whole-class portion. Support struggling students by allowing them to work in small groups and to use the whiteboard tools to select pieces of text and drag them into a statement of "main idea."